Earlier in the week I saw this quote from Wendell Berry go out on Twitter:
Just as a good man would not coerce the love of his wife, God does not coerce the love of His human creatures.
Knowing what I do about Berry, and considering the theological
persuasion of those I see repeating the sentence, I wonder if people
consider this line from Jayber Crow
to be a repudiation of Calvinism. Many people would. I’ve encountered
numerous Christians who object to Reformed theology because they can’t
believe “we are puppets on a string,” or that God “made us as robots,”
or to put it more elegantly like Berry, that God “would coerce the love
of his human creatures.”
And yet, that’s not at all what Calvinism teaches. At least, that’s
not what we should be teaching. It’s true that Calvin, like Augustine
before him, believed the will of God to be the necessity of all things.
But the Church’s leading theologians have always carefully distinguished
between different kinds of necessity. Calvin, for example, though he
held to the highest view of God’s sovereignty vehemently rejected any
notion of necessity which entailed external coercion or compulsion. In
this matter he was simply following Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, and the
entire tradition of Christian orthodoxy. Continue at Kevin DeYoung
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